Why ChatGPT’s Founder Wants to Pump the Brakes on AI | Fortune Daily

0:02Did you ask AI the same question you texted me? I asked AI are we going to be wiped out by AI but it was pretty ironic. It said we're most likely not going to be wiped out by AI. Okay. It was pro itself.

0:20Hello from New York. I'm Ellie Austin and you're watching Fortune Daily. So it was a weekend of intense, sometimes alarming debate about the long-term safety of AI and whether the industry needs to drastically slow its development of models. In an essay published on Saturday, the Anthropic CEO Dario Amodai called on the industry to, quote, pace the frontier, because he warned that AI's capabilities are currently advancing faster than companies and governments can safely manage. The previous day, on Friday, Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alison Chantel sat down for an exclusive, very well-timed interview with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

1:13What makes this moment so rare and so striking is that Altman, one of the people most responsible for accelerating the AI race, said he actually agrees that the frontier needs to be paced or slowed down in layman's terms. To avoid a catastrophic event for humanity is quite scary stuff. Here's exactly what he told Alison Chantal. We're at this interesting moment, but ensuring that it benefits all of humanity is definitely not a given. And we got a sense of that online this week when a former OpenAI employee, Jacob Coxson, went viral for saying He was quitting his job at Anthropic because the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade.

2:00And then one of his other Anthropic buddies chimed in and said, he's totally right. We do earnestly believe that. And it could be by greater than 10 % chance that it kills us all by the end of the decade. Are they right?

2:15I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10 % chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade, obviously. I think the people that are working at these efforts have a huge amount of power and ability to impact what happens here. We have been taking a number of actions. We've reached this new capability level to ensure that we do not take a risk on behalf of humanity like that. And I don't think anybody else should either. We've had moments before, again, this is more capable model, higher stakes than ever before. We've had moments before where we've had to say, okay, the models have reached a new level of capability.

2:52There's a new set of risks. We need to increase our alignment work, our monitoring work, our safety stack in general to be able to mitigate the risks in front of us. We need new policy. We need new coordination within labs. And this is another moment where we need more of that. Emily, thank you so much for joining us to talk about this crazy subject that has been at the top of everyone's minds all weekend. What did you make of what we just saw in Sam Altman's response to Alison's question about the 10 % chance of humanity being wiped out by the end of the decade. I know, I had a little panic. You had a panic.

3:27I had a panic and I texted Emily for reassurance yesterday. And you told me not to worry, which allowed me to resume my weekend. What are you feeling today? Right, I mean, I think today what I'm feeling is I've just been tracking this industry for so long and we've seen these calls, these alarm bells for safety and the risk for humanity for so long. And it's interesting that this one, that Anthropic researchers post, really hit. The Jacob Coxon post, which came out last Tuesday around that time. Yes. Tell us a bit about what he said. He said he quit Anthropic because... Right. So he worked at OpenAI and then Anthropic briefly.

4:02And he quit because he said in both places, people are very aware that the technology could kill us all by the end of the decade. And then the head of alignment at Anthropic retweeted him and said, yes, we earnestly do think that. Which stopped us all in our tracks slightly. So much debate has ensued. Why do you think Jacob Coxon posted what he did at this precise moment in time? You know, there's been a lot of backlash against AI, you know, for a long time, but it's kind of growing and swelling and hitting a bit of a fever pitch. And then also, I think the hugging face hack, which we've talked about several times, really laid the groundwork for this conversation to be taken seriously at the national level.

4:44I think people are waking up to this is scary. We don't have the proper controls. We've already seen this AI in the hugging face example do something that if a human did it, it would be considered a felony. Hacking is illegal. Cyber attacks is not something that you can just do. And yet we see AIs doing this on their own with no human intervention. So that's scary. I think people are starting to feel genuinely in their stomachs, their heart and minds that, hey, this might not be good. And so it's reaching, it's just grown to the point that his post came at the right time and it used the word kill, you know, it's going to kill us all.

5:19It's hard to not react to that. You report on these companies all the time, specifically OpenAI. Why have the leaders inside these companies allegedly let the AI evolve to this point? Why haven't they pressed pause already if we're thinking about kind of mass extinction of humankind? I mean, it's a really good question because you have to assume positive intent on these people, but they've also been talking about this for several years and haven't really done enough. I mean, we saw that OpenAI was caught unaware and kind of reeling from the hugging face hack in the sense that it didn't know the AIs were doing that when they were doing it.

5:58It did not have the proper monitoring. And what Sam Altman's alluding to in that clip is that since that happened, they have had to strengthen their monitoring, their safeguards. They've had to make their testing environments more isolated. So they, while saying it was an issue for so long, actually weren't putting in place the right safeguards. So I think we have to question their seriousness about the topic. Of course, it's great that they're appearing to take it more seriously, but we really have to hold them accountable because they have a track record of kind of talking out of both sides of their mouth.

6:29Who's we and who's holding them accountable? Because President Trump over the weekend didn't seem particularly alarmed, I think it's fair to say, by this conversation. Sam Altman did say in the interview with Alison that he and the other AI leaders are talking and are committed to finding a solution. But where do you envisage this accountability coming from? Well, I think what we're seeing now is an interesting just kind of a groundswell of just everyday people, you know, retweeting or reposting that is putting pressure on them. And I think it's just difficult because at this moment, it's still very vague.

7:05So he said it's going to kill us all. How? You know, like it could get out of control. It's still an elaborate kind of multi-step thing. I know they say it's again there's a 10 % chance it could kill us by the end of the decade. How do you quantify that? What is 10 %? 10 % what? Some people say 50%. I had Jeffrey Hinton, one of the godfathers of AI, say 50-50. What's the formula that we're, you know, putting our our necks on the line for? So everything is still very vague and I think we're in this moment now of starting to take it seriously, but the conversation is still very young and not evolved.

7:36So one of my reactions to that post, the Jacob Coxon post was just, okay, so you worked at these companies for three years. Do you have an email you can share where leaders disregarded the risks of moving quickly? Is there something in the research process that you would change specifically? Is there a law you think would really help with the slowdown? Is it to limit data center construction or is it to limit something else? you know if you work at a company for this long you might have an idea about how to save your own life if you're saying it might kill you it's technology you've been working on by the end of the decade so i think we really need to ask a lot more of the people in the industry it's great they're speaking out but we need more substantive conversation around this and we need to not just accept a viral social media post we need to go deeper playing devil's advocate for a second there have been other people this weekend who have been very skeptical of these claims of kind of mass catastrophe.

8:31Some people have said this is all a marketing campaign by the men, and it's largely men, running these companies who want to emphasize the influence and power of their businesses in the run-up to many of them, or a couple of them, trying to IPO. We've actually got a quote from Sam Altman about the timeline of the potential OpenAI IPO. So let's watch that. As you're looking at all of this together, why is there still a pressure to feel like you need to move really fast. Where does that pressure come from? Is it the business pressure? I mean, you're looking at a trillion dollar IPO. I'm curious if that's still a priority for you.

9:09As we've said, we're not rushing into an IPO. I actually think that given everything happening with safety, this would be right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public. And we don't feel pressure on that. We've said for a long time, we'll do it when we're ready, which is when the business is ready, when we feel ready from a kind of what the moment is like in society with this technology um that sounds like not 2026 2027 potential i would say not 2026 yeah i don't like we got a lot of stuff to do um and like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment and how the industry and governments can work together i'm happy to be able to do that as a private company So what do you make of people who say this is all an elaborate marketing campaign, just a reason to talk about IPOs?

10:01I think people just generally have a mistrust for the tech industry. So that's where that's coming from. And it's warranted. I mean, after so long, we've seen regulation not meet the moment with social media. We have seen so much power move into Silicon Valley. So it's a natural feeling to not trust. At the same time, I do think we need to take them seriously. You know, if this many people, we've had researchers signing letters, many open letters, manifestos. I mean, how much more do the people working on this technology have to do to get some attention and some control? They're begging for it.

10:32They're asking for it. So I think it's legitimate. OpenAI did can a model, did they not, in the wake of the hugging face attack? Yeah, they did. They did. And like I said, they did add a lot more infrastructure to monitor their AIs and keep them isolated in testing and things like that. Is there more that they could do. Is it reasonable for them to do that just with the market and commercial pressure? So these are all questions that we need to ask. What should the average person be doing and thinking in response to all of this? As I said, I personally spent the weekend spiraling, which was not particularly helpful.

11:07How do we continue with our day-to-day lives, continue using AI? Some people continue investing in these companies against the backdrop of what we have heard this weekend. What would your advice be? Well, did you ask AI the same question you texted I asked AI, are we going to be wiped out by AI, which was pretty ironic. It said we're most likely not going to be wiped out by AI. Okay. So it was pro itself. And, you know, surprise, surprise. Yeah. It was protecting its own, I don't know, extinction. But I did ask it that question. Yeah. Yeah. We're all using it. And so it's also good to be honest about that.

11:41What can we do? I mean, there's a good Jeff Bezos quote that says when I'm stressed about something, it's usually because I'm not doing anything about it. So I think that's the right thing. So if you're politically inclined, you know, calling your representatives and saying, you know, I really feel uncomfortable about this technology and I want to know that the powers that be are handling it, you know, please do it. Take it seriously. I also think it's a good time to educate yourself. There are, you know, a lot of new trends. There's always new words related to AI that it's really good to know.

12:08So recursive self-improvement is the buzzword. Entered the lexicon this week. Enter the lexicon. Yeah. So that's that means AIs that are just improving on their own without human intervention. So that's that's really kind of scary. Like we feel a sense of it snowballing and getting better, you know, without a human in the loop. Right. Without a human in a loop is what's the scariest about all of this. So I think really educating yourself on how it works. What is AI training? How does it produce that response that you're getting at work or you're asking, you know, are we all going to die? So I think really understanding it will create a sense of empowerment.

12:43Emily, thank you so much. We'll be back to speak to you about this very soon, I'm sure. So there's 45 minutes of Alison Chantel interviewing Sam Altman. I really suggest you watch the whole thing, particularly given everything that's been happening this weekend. You can find that interview on Fortune's YouTube channel and we'll drop a link to the interview in the show notes. Next up, senior reporter Elena Pringle delves into the plummeting birth rate in Under the Radar. Women want dads, not duds. A Nobel winning historian has a theory on falling birth rates, but the economics aren't so straightforward.

13:18My name is Eleanor Pringle. I'm a senior reporter at Fortune covering markets and economics. I saw a paper by Nobel winning economic historian Claudia Golden. I had a chat with Claudia, but I also wanted to cover a wider macroeconomic piece about declining birth rates in developed economies. Claudia Golden is a Nobel Prize winning economic historian. She works at Harvard University and she has been writing for the majority of her career about women in the economy. I was scrolling the National Bureau of Economic Research, as you do, and when I saw Claudia's name, I was instantly wondering, what was it she was thinking about?

13:59Claudia proposes the idea that perhaps women who are are hardworking, very fulfilled by their careers, highly educated. Perhaps they're concerned about the autonomy they would lose if they were to have a child and their partners didn't share the workload. This isn't just a US phenomenon. This is a conversation we're having in developed economies across the world. I think part of the reason we're having this conversation at the moment, one of the reasons why it's rising up the political and the social agenda is because in the US, for example, birth rates have now fallen below replacement levels, which means that people aren't having children at the rates needed to sustain a nation's population at a size and stability from one generation to the next.

14:49How can women predict whether or not their partners will be dads or duds? And following on to that, how can men who want to demonstrate to their partners that they will be dads? How can they demonstrate that they will support their partners' careers and education and wider life goals? And when I asked Claudia that question, she said, yes, we don't yet know what the commitment mechanisms for men look like. How do we quantify how much men can show up in their relationships? It's not necessarily a conversation between men and women. We can't just boil it down to a relationship between two people because the macro economy has such massive influences over these decisions, particularly for millennials and Gen Z.

15:34And we're really seeing that in a lot of different data points at the moment. Things like the cost of raising a child, the questions that a lot of people are asking themselves about, is this the sort of environment that they want to be bringing children into? What might the impact be on their careers, whether they're a man or a woman? What are the wider societal implications of having a child. And this kind of led us to having much broader conversations than the current economic moment. The need to have children in an economy has shifted from the household level to the much wider societal. You know, when we look at immigration, when we look at replacement levels, we need labour, we need people to help keep growing the economy.

16:23And that's why the factors influencing whether or not to have children and the end results are being discussed so intensely at the moment. Next up, billionaires are buying the farm. It's Sasha Rogelberg with The Business of Luxury. American billionaires are showing off their farmland for elaborate hobbies, but a buying spree among the ultra-rich risks pricing farmers out. I'm Sasha Rogelberg, and I'm a reporter for Fortune. Basically, we've seen in recent headlines that billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Alexis Ohanian have been snapping up farmland for their own really interesting and unique hobbies.

17:06So Mark Zuckerberg has been buying land in Hawaii since around 2014, and it has culminated into a$300 million property that spans more than 4 ,000 acres. And on that property, Zuckerberg has been raising premium Angus and Wagyu beef just for his own hobby. And similarly, Alexis Ohanian has a family farm in Florida, and he is growing all of these crops just for his own interest. Farmland has become a$4.3 trillion asset class, really with growing interest among the ultra-wealthy. Zuckerberg and Ohanian's ventures are absolutely tiny compared to the farmland and ranch land that other one percenters are grabbing.

17:51So according to the 2025 land report, Bill Gates owns 275 ,000 acres of land, only the 44th greatest landowner in America right now. Jeff Bezos has nearly half a million acres. And really, who holds the top spot is Stan Kroenke. He is the Los Angeles Rams owner, and he owns 2.7 million acres of farmland. So similar to the real estate boom of the 1970s, farmland became a really popular asset class beginning around 2008 during the financial crisis. And it was really considered an alternative safe haven asset. First of all, it's a finite resource, meaning as the population continues to grow, as there's fear about food scarcity, land becomes much more valuable.

18:42And as a result, the cost of land has really, really increased. And land has really even become more popular recently when you think about hyperscalers wanting to grab land for their own data center construction. There's real concern among agriculture advocates that as more wealthy individuals snap up farmland, it becomes really less accessible for the actual farmers who need it. So nearly 40 % of landowners are actually landlords, and they lease that land to farmers and operators, according to the USDA. And this isn't inherently a bad thing. It's not, you know, renting isn't necessarily a bad thing for farmers, particularly those who are just starting out.

19:28Renting is much cheaper than owning or buying land. However, it means that farmers don't have full control over their land. It means that it's harder for them to make long-term investments to improve their soil quality or to build out the infrastructure that they need to sustain these farms over a long period of time. It also means that farmers may be unable to use their land as leverage to take out loans. I think the ultra-wealthy's interest in farmland really highlights kind of these two halves of America that we're seeing, where you have the one percenters who are using this land to bolster their own wealth or even for their own hobbies and interests or to become landlords.

20:17and then you have American farmers who have a real concern about being able to own their land and who in many cases need to own their land in order to continue to survive as business people. That's it for Fortune Daily. I'm Ellie Austin. Remember to let us know what you thought of today's show. Leave a comment on our YouTube. I'll see you next time.